I've tried to map out where, approximately, my data lies across the big tech and social media corporations. I don't expect that I will be able to fully extract myself from these ecosystems, or even that I will want to, but knowing what I have where is at least a starting point.
This is absolutely an incomplete list. All of these companies, especially Google and Facebook, gather just a mindboggling amount of your data beyond the stuff you'd immediately expect. And, despite the conspiracy theories, they don't need to covertly listen to you to do so.
Obviously the big one here is the content itself - who my friends are, what I post, what I react to or comment on, all my instant messages, and so on. But less obvious are the inferences it can draw from that data.
The most concerning one, not just for Facebook but for all of these big data corporations, is location data - From GPS, from WiFi networks, from the metadata in photos you're tagged in, and so on.
And then there are the companies Facebook (or more accurately Meta) own, such as WhatsApp and Instagram. The concerns about Instagram are essentially the same as with Facebook, but WhatsApp deserves special consideration. Facebook didn't pay 19 billion dollars for WhatsApp as a public service, and despite making a lot of noise about their "end-to-end encryption" that still leaves them with a lot of very detailed metadata about who somebody is messaging, when, and how often.
Oh boy, where to start. Search history. Browser history. YouTube comments. Google Calendar. The same location tracking via mobile apps that Facebook and others do. Everything in Google Drive or Google Docs. Google Maps (and Waze - another $1.3bn not spent out of altruism). That's just a given.
And of course, there's Gmail. Google, alongside Microsoft, utterly dominate the email market and all that data - everything I order online, every job I apply for, every website I sign up for - is gristle for the advertising mill.
LOL. I don't think there's much that I haven't already covered with Google or Facebook, but now there's the additional complication that all that data is at the whims of The Most Divorced Man Ever.
I've grouped these together because, by and large, they aren't as interested in harvesting user data for advertising. That's not to say they aren't a concern, and it's good to be aware of their reach - for example, Amazon owns both game-streaming platform Twitch and book-loving social cataloguing site Goodreads - but at least they're only trying to sell me their own products, rather than the algorithmic behaviour modification for rent of the advertising-driven corporations like Facebook or Google.
It's a truism, but to these corporations we are not the customers; we are the product. I don't think it's going to be possible, in the current online environment, to extricate myself from these platforms entirely but I do think it's wise to make it as difficult as possible for them, and to maintain as much independence as possible from them.